As much as I love him Kryten is Science Fiction. Solar powered electrical sources are real, will be viable within the next 4 years and will be effectively free within ten years without the need for any petroleum. In five years time oil will cost so much more than solar that oil burners will be seen as environmental insensitive retro throwbacks. Betcha!

You ignore the fact that electric cars run on coal. No power stations ,no go. Good luck charging your Tesla from a solar panel.

Even if your source of power is 100% dirty (ie coal), Tesla estimates that you are emitting about 1/3 as many greenhouse gases because of the fact that the power plant is so much more efficient in turning coal into electricity into your Tesla into movement than your car is turning fuel into movement.

Tesla's supercharging stations are all 100% powered by solar. Renewable. Others are usually solar as I understand but not all of them. Important that non-Tesla "supercharging" stations are just regular charging and although they are compatible with all vehicles they are much slower because other shitty cars like the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt are still throwbacks to the "golf cart" idea of the electric car and can't get the same power at the same rate.

Most importantly, you do NOT need charging stations!! The beauty about the Teslas is that at its SMALLEST range option you get more than 350 km out of a single charge. I would rarely drive this in a week. For LONG DISTANCE travel you use a charging network. People are correct in pointing out that there are less than 10 in Australia atm. Despite this, you can get from Melbourne to Sydney on the charging network, and by the end of the year up to Brissy and Cairns. For free. Tesla have pledged/planned to DOUBLE the amount of chargers in the world by the time the Model 3 is out at the end of next year. Naturally, Adelaide will join too, then Perth, and sooner or later you'll be able to go around Australia. For free. Cleanly. That's huge. Yes it will take a while but there's < 1,000 Model S's in Australia at the moment and just over 100,000 in the world. They have sold almost 400,000 pre-orders of the Model 3. By the time the demand is there, the chargers will be there (or on their way).

People whinging about chargers and the cleanliness of the energy are looking at this backwards. Tesla's mission is to move the world to sustainable transport by making an EV that changes people's thoughts about EVs. Through some unbelievable engineering and perseverance they have done it. People love the Model S, it is a leader in its class. Many can't afford it and want the Model 3. They love this thing as evidenced by the pre-order levels, and more importantly than anything, they have attracted the attention of the other auto makers. As much as it annoys me, this thing is the iPhone. The Chevy Volt, GM Bolt and Nissan Leaf are the shitty knock off android and Nokia phones that attempted to copy the iPhone in 2007. But without the iPhone, we wouldn't have the Galaxy S4 onwards or Google Nexus' or other low, mid and high cost Android phones worth their salt.

Its just the fear factor of running out of fuel during a drive isn't it?

Tesla's biggest competitor in my eyes is Hydrogen.

Yeah absolutely.

Again using the iPhone analogy, compare the iPhone 1 to the 6S+. Advances in battery technology can take us further than we are now not to mention whole paradigm shifts (graphene etc.) could make this orders of magnitude better than we could even envision. As more money goes (slowly) into renewables, requirement for home and industrial scale storage will see a huge press on developing better and better batteries.

Its just the fear factor of running out of fuel during a drive isn't it?

Tesla's biggest competitor in my eyes is Hydrogen.

Hydrogen is lot more complex of a system and really really unsafe. Not discounting it entirely but it has a lot of flaws and 0 runs on the board. Tesla has very few and several, respectively.

Although seemingly harsh I think you are too generous towards hydrogen. There is currently no way of storing it at high enough mass and energy densities for practical use, and it doesn't show much promise for the vast improvement needed any time soon. You need to be able to squash it into a small enough volume without wasting too much energy in doing so, a problem which has eluded scientists for decades.